Metal oxides are of immense technological importance. Their wide variety of structural and electronic characteristics leads to a flexibility unrivalled by other groups of materials. However, there is still much debate about the fundamental properties of some of the most widely used oxides, including TiO<sub>2</sub> and In<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub>. This work presents high quality, in-depth characterisation of these two oxides in pure and doped form, including soft and hard X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction. Bulk samples as well as thin film samples were prepared analysed. For the preparation of thin films a high quality sol-gel dip-coating method was developed, which resulted in epitaxial films. In more detail the organisation of the thesis is as follows: Chapter 1 provides an introduction to key ideas related to metal oxides and presents the metal oxides investigated in this thesis, In<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub>, Ga<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub>, Tl<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub>, TiO<sub>2</sub>, and SnO<sub>2</sub>. Chapter 2 presents background information and Chapter 3 gives the practical details of the experimental techniques employed. Chapters 4 presents reciprocal space maps of MBE-grown In<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub> thin films and nanorods on YSZ substrates. Chapters 5 and 6 investigate the doping of In<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub> bulk samples with gallium and thallium and introduce a range of solid state characterisation techniques. Chapter 7 describes the development of a dip-coating sol-gel method for the growth of thin films of TiO<sub>2</sub> and shows 3D reciprocal space maps of the resulting films. Chapter 8 concerns hard x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy of undoped and Sn-doped TiO<sub>2</sub>. Chapter 9 interconnects previous chapters by presenting 2D reciprocal space maps of nano structured epitaxial samples of In<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub> grown by the newly developed sol-gel based method. Chapter 10 concludes this thesis with a summary of the results.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:635234 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Regoutz, Anna |
| Contributors | Egdell, Russell |
| Publisher | University of Oxford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6f425890-b211-4b35-b438-b8de18f7ae64 |
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